The Centre told the Supreme Court that nearly ninety per cent of bills passed by state assemblies since 1970 were granted gubernatorial assent within a month, while assent was withheld in only about twenty cases of a total of 17,150 bills presented. The Constitution bench, led by Chief Justice B. R. Gavai, hearing a presidential reference on whether timelines can be fixed for assent by governors and the President, raised objections to the Centre’s reliance on such data, stating it “will not be fair to other side as they were not allowed to refer to any such data.”
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, arguing for the Union, said that in the 55 years covered, only twenty bills had their assent withheld, seven of which concerned a dispute in Tamil Nadu. He emphasised that governors are not mere routers of legislation—they have constitutional discretion under Article 200 to grant, withhold, reserve or return a bill with recommendations, and that this role must not be reduced to that of a “postman”. The Centre’s stance was presented as empirical evidence to support its argument that governors assented 90 percent of bills within a month and therefore blanket timelines might be unwarranted.
Senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Singhvi, representing states and intervenors opposed to the reference, contested the fairness of the Centre introducing statistics that had been barred to them earlier in the hearing. Sibal noted that most of the alleged withholding instances had arisen after 2014. The bench echoed this concern, pointing out that those challenging the reference were deprived of similar data, making the Centre’s data submission one-sided.
The five-judge Constitution bench—which includes Justices Surya Kant, Vikram Nath, P. S. Narasimha and A. S. Chandurkar—made it clear it intends to confine its deliberations to the specific questions referred by the President under Article 143 and would not re-open or revisit the correctness of the earlier division-bench judgment from April, which had laid down timelines for governors to act. The court reiterated that it would stick to answering the precise issues posed.
State Legislatures Tell SC: Governors, President Can’t Stall Bills 